Category: Stuff

With a bit of time to kill, I checked out some new websites on the Internet using a discovery tool that points you toward other sites that people recommend. Most of them were predictable, some pretty ordinary too, although all had something about them that held your interest for a moment at least.

Then I happened upon the Digital Photo Challenge website and discovered a place that I could hang out for a long time. Photography has been a hobby of mine since I was a kid and walked around with a Heinz Tunafish Camera, looking out its eye and pulling its fin to take the shot. After that came a progression of cameras. It has been one area that I have never stopped doing. Most others fade away eventually, but the challenge of photography remains, as does the joy of getting a fantastic shot.

My photos do not compare very well with some of the favourite photos shown on this website. They are incredible pieces of work and a delight to look at and study. The best part is that many of the important bits of information are there so that they can be studied. Shutter speeds, f-stops, and more all point toward part of the method used to get the effect in the photo. Very valuable information.

There are competitions on a regular basis held at this website, and the photos of all of the winners that I have looked at are just fantastic. So I have a challenge ahead of me now, which is to see if any of my photos are even close to this quality. It will be fun trying.

With a bunch more photos in hand, and hundreds still stuck on my laptop that all need to be sorted, it was time to do something about it. I currently have thousands of photos sorted into folders according to the time and place they were taken. This works pretty good too, but when somebody comes and asks me to see all the photos of “so and so” it becomes an endless work of digging through every folder in search of any photos which may contain “so and so”. This is the same problem that I have when people want photos for “such and such” too.

Now I have been aware of this problem for a while, and have been trialing a number of different software types in search of the perfect solution. Of course there is no such thing as the perfect solution, but it is nice to come close at least. Finally, I suspect that I have found what I need.

IMatch 3 is a photo cataloguing program that, although a little technical to start with, provides all the functionality I need at a price that is affordable. I had previously looked at using the iView program (now part of the Phase One software group) which is very good too, but it had a much higher investment cost that I could not justify. Impulse Adventure provided a great comparison page between all of the different programs that could do this sort of job for me, and through this and other reviews that I read, it was obvious that IMatch was a great program.

So now I am busy in all of my spare time starting to sort out each and every single photo that I have. At last check there were something like 21,000 photos that I need to catalogue, but this keeps growing every time I take more shots. Some of these photos are currently on the web, but it has been a while since I added more there because of the state of disrepair my photos had fallen into.

Now I have new hope that one day they will all be sorted, and if I should ever want to find all of my photos that contain “closeups of Henry and Julie together in Argentina during 2004” then it is a simple click of a button to find them. There is a lot of work to get there, but it is highly feasible. After all, this is a small image collection compared to many photographers out there.

So if you are wondering what I may be doing couped up indoors for days on end, you can be sure that I will be sorting photos. Sorting, sorting, sorting, sorting, sorting…

…til it is done.

There is something that really bugs me no matter how many times I see it happening. That is when my email address turns up in a group email addressed to dozens of people. What am I saying? That I don’t want to receive emails sent to groups? Not at all. I like to receive emails if they are relevant to me. I just don’t like to receive an email that lists my email address in amongst anything from five to thirty others… ready for spam harvesting.

Now I am not going to re-invent the wheel here. There are lots of great websites out there explaining the why’s, wherefore’s, howto’s and moral reasons for all of this. I just want to say that if you are new to email, please read what they have to say as it makes a big difference.

My personal testimony is that only recently, after 2 years of not even one single spam email, I have started to be inundated with spam. Why? Only recently has my email address been sent out to groups of people WITHOUT using this BCC technique.

The BCC Field – James S. Huggins

My friends send me “stuff”. And organizations I belong to send me “stuff”. And mailing lists I am on send me “stuff”. When you send people stuff you can send it in two distinct ways: 1. So that everyone can see everybody else’s email address, and 2. So that everyone can’t see everybody else’s email address.

When you put the email addresses in the “To” field or in the “CC” field, everyone can see everyone else’s email address. But, when you use the “BCC” field, the system hides the addresses of everyone else. I am writing this page to encourage everyone to learn about the “BCC” field and to learn how to use it…

Your E-Mail Responsibility – Duane Alan Hahn

If you would like to do something to protect your friends and family from spammers, stalkers, swindlers, and who knows what else, use BCC instead of To or CC when sending group e-mails. You might think that it’s not a big deal, but when you send a group e-mail without using BCC, it’s usually not just going to be seen by the people you send it to. They will send it to their friends, and they will send it to their friends, and it goes on and on until all of those e-mail addresses get in the hands of ‘evil doers.’

Blind Carbon Copy – (How-to with images) [LINK NO LONGER WORKS]

Usually when someone sends an email to say, four people, they will just list them in the “to:” or “cc:” field. The problem with this practice is simple: everyone who receives the email also receives all of the email addresses. This is wonderful for spammers, but most of us would rather our email addresses were at least somewhat protected.

How to Protect Your Email Address – MailNull

There are ways to fight spam by filtering and other mechanisms, many of which provide excellent coverage. However there are always the ones the sneak through and there is also the worrying prospect of the important message classified as spam. One of the foolproof mechanisms for having a spam-free inbox involves starting with a “fresh” email address and protecting it aggressively. This means dropping the address you have currently, getting a new one, and letting your contacts know about the switch. Once you are on a spam list, it is basically impossible to ever get off. The “mail here to unsubscribe” are almost always fake and will do more harm than good.

I hope that after visiting each of these websites and reading what they have to say, that you are now a wiser and more wary netizen.

Entering “The Club”
Having been a computer technician, I guess I should know better. There is a kind of a club that evolves around each group of technicians in a company. You do not ever just “enter” this club, but rather “earn” your way into it by demonstrating over a period of time (and problems) that you really do have the know-how. Of course things such as paper-work and a known history help out a lot in this regard too.

Outsiders
Although there is nothing directly wrong with this sort of club forming, there is a problem that occurs the moment a technical issue arises. You see, if you are not in this “club” then you simply are not a technician. If you are not a technician, then you cannot possibly know about anything technical. Therefore all of your thoughts and ideas on the problem really are insignificant.

In the eyes of those belonging to the “club”, you are a dunce, a drop-out, a know-it-all that knows nothing. Saying that you actually belong to another “club” just like the one that the kindly gent looking at your equipment belongs to only serves to cement their certainty that you are a know-it-all that really knows nothing.

The worst part about all of this situation is that even if the tech you are talking with OBVIOUSLY knows very little about your particular problem, the assumption is that he still knows a tremendous amount more than you. Even if this happens to be your area of specialty.

The Dance
So when it comes to reporting a fault or problem with computers, I need to go through the same dance every single time. The one thing that I have learned however is that there is absolutely no point in telling them that you are a tech. After all, if you ARE a tech, why are you not solving the problem for yourself instead of involving us in it? The fact that you bought the item from their shop and want them to deem it faulty has nothing to do with anything.

The dance goes something like this: bring the faulty item to the tech and tell him that there is a problem with it. Watch while the tech does the same things as you did and then tells you that your item has a problem with it. If he doesn’t find the problem first off, then the dance continues.

Insist that there is a problem with the item, and explain how it occurred and why you think that there is a problem. Watch the tech repeat the same steps as before, totally ignoring your explanation of how to locate the problem, and tell you that there is nothing wrong with it. Repeat this insistance, but this time, as the tech goes through the steps, tell him what he needs to do step by step, until he finally does it. Listen to him tell you that your item is faulty.

A Problem Arises
Now that I know this dance, life has become much easier. So when one of the items I bought in Ciudad del Este failed to work as expected, I needed to race back to the shop again to start my dance. I had bought myself an external hard drive case and a nice 250Gb hard drive to go inside of it. But it was not working.

Time was very limited, as the shops shut at 4pm Argentina time and it was 3pm when I discovered the problem. I did not go through every step possible nor read through the documentation as I would normally do to ensure that there was not a simple explanation for the problem. This explains the final outcome.

The bus journey from Puerto Iguazu through Brazil to the Bridge of Friendship took 40 minutes. It may have taken longer but there were only two of us onboard so our driver took the short way there. From here I climbed aboard a motor-taxi and raced over the bridge to the door of the shop where I had bought my drive. And then my dance began.

Doing The Dance
The problem was that the drive was making some very nasty noises and refused to start spinning up to the 7200RPM that it was rated at. Well, it just refused to start spinning. So I explained this to the young technician, who listened to the drive and agreed with me that there was a problem, but told me that they had already closed up for the day and that I should come back in the morning.

After a heart-pleading cry stating that I would be in another part of the world (Corrientes) in the morning and that I raced back here from Argentina to fix this problem, I finally coaxed them into action, and recieved my replaced drive. But the drive comes in two parts, one part is the drive itself and the other is the box that encases it. The new drive was doing the same thing, making the same noises as before. So it must be the box.

There was another technician nearby who off-handedly said that “they all do that”. This was enough for the tech attending me to tell me that this was not a problem at all and that I simply needed to install the drivers and prepare the drive for use in Windows. This seemed odd to me, so I insisted that they check the box and show me the drive working.

After much pleading, the tech started the process of showing me, but never succeeded. I assumed it was the box, and told him that if he could replace the box and it did the same thing then I would believe him that it was the “normal” thing and that I simply needed to install some driver and all would be well. But the box was not under warranty, only the drive. I had to buy another box.

False Hope
Truly believing that this would fix my problems, I raced over to the counter which was now closed. A shout from behind me told the guy sitting uninterested behind the desk to attend me. Computers were off so he nonchalently found a book and went through the manual process of paperwork. I sat waiting in a now almost vacated building, listening to the second hand tick off the minutes.

Finally he finished the process and I paid for then received my new (and hopefully working) box. After putting everything back together again, I plugged it in expectantly. I was waiting for the whizzing sound of a whirring drive. That sound never came. It was the same horrible click click noise.

There were two techs standing there now, both looking at me with that sort of look on their faces that said, “I told you so.” I believed them too, after all, what are the chances of two boxes failing in one time. I must have been wrong. So with two boxes in my hand, one with a drive in it that still went “click click”, I headed back home to install the mystery driver and set up my drive for Windows.

The Problem Persists
Another drive on a motor-taxi over the bridge and a bus ride through Brazil and I was back in Argentina again. The problem was that no matter what I did with this drive, it just never worked.

So now I am left with two boxes, and one drive. I assume that the drive works, but the boxes don’t. Perhaps they were never designed for such a big drive. So what do I do now? Well, I hope to find a solution somehow. It should have been resolved by the tech, but instead the problem has been left with me. Maybe I am wrong still, but the future is looking dim.

But this is a great example of why computer technicians do not help.

I had hardly ever heard about these things in the days leading up to what happpen to me, but somehow I just happened to hear about Rootkits and special programs to detect them. It was a couple of weeks before that I had visited SysInternals.com to grab some of their utilities. One of their new programs was the “Root Kit Revealer”. It seemed like a good idea to grab that one too while I was there, but I was busy at the time and it just sat in my pile of “yet to be looked at” programs.

Needless to say, that since that moment there was the thought in the back of my mind that I needed to check out my machine at somepoint. This thought nagged at me for a while before I actually did check it out… motivated as I was by some strange and unexplainable behaviours in my computer. Such things as keys not registering being pressed, internet going fast and then slow and fast again, the computer heating up significantly during idle times when I was away from it, and stuff like that.

So when I checked everything out, it turned out that there was something on my machine. Now, not knowing much about these things, I still wonder if it really was there or not. Perhaps it was a ghost, and I overreacted, but after reading about the insecurity that comes from having one of these things, I could not take the chance. I did all that I knew possible to remove this thing from my PC and although parts of it seemed to go, other parts kept reappearing on every restart.

My anti-virus program did not fix it, and nor did my anti-spyware program. But they say that this is the way it works… it is something that is invisible to windows normally, and hides from these sorts of programs. So after unsuccessful attempts at removing it, I decided that the only thing left was following the advice given for these things… and reformatted my hard drive to reinstall Windows once again.

It is amazing the amount of stuff that sits on my computer that I still consider useful. Since this event I have become much more ruthless with which files I save, but there is still a bunch of stuff. Worst of all was sorting through the mazes of folders to find and save all of my important information.

I described this experience to someone that knew very little about computers as being very similar to moving everything out of your house because of some nasty fungus, destroying the house, and then rebuilding it again and moving all of your stuff back into it. It is about the same sort of effort, although a different scale and level.

So the end of it all is that I am now up and running again, without any nasty viruses, and have nothing much different to last time. Just a few hours less sleep. How did I get it in the first place? I am not really sure. I remember running a downloaded file once, thinking that my protection programs were active, but my anti-spyware program was not working at the time. That experience loaded my computer with a bunch of nasties… perhaps at that point it entered my PC. In any case, I have learned to be extra careful now-a-days. After all, they say for good reason…

“once bitten twice shy”.

Hi all. I have finally organised for myself a Post Box address to which you can send me anything. No matter how many times I move I will still be able to receive your flood of letters.

Send to me at the follow address:

Casilla Correo 218
Correo Central
1000 Capital Federal
Bs.As. Argentina

I will be checking it once per week unless you tell me I need to check it more often. I look forward to collecting my bundles of letters soon. Take care, Rob.

NB: This information is OUT OF DATE and no longer relevant. It is kept here for completeness’ sake.